Los Angeles in the 1930S, Is Many Books in One

The WPA Guide to Renaissance Florence, or A Writer’s Paradise Los Angeles has usually needed water far too much to worry about what was in it. In 1939, though, the question becomes impossible to avoid: What was in the water? Raymond Chandler was stripping his pulp stories for parts to build his first novel, The Big Sleep. John Fante was mining his misery for Ask the Dust. F. Scott Fitzgerald was trying to stay on the wagon in Encino and mapping out The Last Tycoon. And Nathanael West was inventing film noir by day—hacking away at RKO B pictures like The Stranger on the Third Floor—and writing his master- piece, The Day of the Locust, at night. On the studio lot, Victor Fleming was cleaning up his betters’ messes on both Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Dalton Trumbo was working just as hard, climbing to the top of the screenwriter’s pay scale and tossing off the great antiwar novel Johnny Got His Gun between as- signments. And Orson Welles, like Los Angeles, was about to peak and didn’t know it. If only there were some record, some almanac of what it was like to walk those laughably walkable boulevards, to breathe that ludicrously per- fumed air. If only some benevolent patron had stepped in and commis- sioned a panorama of prewar Los Angeles, so that future generations could enjoy it vicariously—maybe even try to replicate the freakish atmo- spheric conditions that made those masterworks possible. In other words, if only there existed the book that you, like a sleeper hoping vainly to drag some treasure back from dreamland, now hold in your hand. On July 27, 1935, President Roosevelt had signed legislation autho- rizing the Federal Writers Project. The Project recognized that scrib- blers, no less than stonemasons and bridge builders, needed work. For any reader, the crowning glory of the New Deal will always be this and the other American Guides, a series of travel companions to 48 states, many cities, and any number of deserts, rivers, and other wonders—all created to “hold up a mirror to America.” John Steinbeck navigated by xix xx a writer’ s paradise the guides to write Travels With Charley, in which he called them “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together, and nothing since has even approached it.” The American Guide Series, in turn, was only one endeavor of the larger Federal Writers Project (FWP), which also turned out a raft of invaluable studies, including oral histories of freed slaves. The FWP, meanwhile, was but a single arm of Federal One, which also included the music, art, and theater projects that gave Orson Welles, among other artists, their biggest sandbox to date. And Federal One—stay with me here—was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which belonged to a whole Scrabble rack of acronyms that came out of the New Deal. Finally, the New Deal was shorthand for all the programs devised to fight the Depression under the leadership of the most effec- tive monogram of them all: FDR. He wrote this guide or nobody did. To compile a well-organized guidebook to Los Angeles would be, of course, to misrepresent the city completely. Even a well-organized essay on the subject invites trouble. Neither attempt has been made here. The WPA guide to Los Angeles proceeds, sensibly enough, from I. Los Angeles: A General Survey, to II. Los Angeles Points of Inter- est, through III. Neighboring Cities, to, finally, IV. The Country Around Los Angeles. This has logic in its favor, but occasions a fair amount of unobjectionable repetition. The book develops more or less concentrically, like ripples in a tarn—or, to pick a more homegrown metaphor, like an earthquake. This facsimile edition, Los Angeles in the 1930s, is many books in one. (Not surprising, since it had dozens of contributors.) It’s a guidebook, of course, complete with still-enjoyable walking and driving tours, res- taurant and hotel recommendations, even species-specific hunting laws. (Perhaps atoning for 1920s extermination of the state animal, the Cali- fornia grizzly, the California Department of Fish and Game apparently set a strict taking limit on the state bird: a mere ten California valley quail a day.) The guide also qualifies as addictively readable history, with vivid accounts of L.A. under the flags of colonial Spain, Mexico, the fleeting California Republic, and, at last, the United States. And finally, no one thinks of it this way, but the WPA guide to Los Angeles is a compact coffee-table book of dazzling monochrome photography, with mostly (unlike the text) attributed contributions from the likes of Julius Shul- man, Bret Weston, and the sadly unremembered Fred William Carter, about whom a bit more later. But the guide may mesmerize most today as a set of elusive precon- ditions for a writer’s paradise, a lost map to Shangri-La—an Eden kit. (The creator of Shangri-La himself, Lost Horizon author James Hilton, was even living in the vicinity, alternating underrated novels with over- a writer’ s paradise xxi rated screenplays.) Against all reason, I can’t help thinking that some- where within my first-edition copy must lurk the necessary recipe for this fleeting cocktail of genius, if we could only look closely enough to find it. Did the juice of a windfall orange drip off the original owner’s chin, causing the fateful page to stick to its neighbor? HINDSIGHT Whatever the secret, it sure wasn’t general prosperity. In the late ’30s, plenty of people still lacked even a room to go to bed hungry in. The Depression plays an oddly recessive role in these pages, usually referred to in the past tense but occasionally in the imperfect, as if not quite safely behind us. And an auto tour to Crystal Lake includes a fascinat- ing if less than scenic side trip past “hooverville, 1 m., now only a scattering of tattered tents and crude log shacks along the banks of the river between Susanna and Graveyard Canyons, but in the depression years 1930–33 a collection of 500-odd shacks, tents, and dugouts occu- pied by gold-seeking unemployed male transients” (p. 303). When all else failed, this reflex to scratch a livelihood from the earth beat deep in the veins of Depression-era Angelenos—some of whom, even by 1938, were still a few years older than the state in which they lived. The lazy production designer’s temptation to think of the period as a sleek metropolis of ’30s Packards tooling endlessly past Art Deco showplaces is even more absurd than expecting everyone in 2010 to carry an iPad. On the contrary, Angelenos of the 1930s had ample reason to try and wring an extra few years’ wear out of their pre-Depression hand-me-downs. One explanation for the crazy-quilt qual- ity of the built environment was that, for want of money, few teardowns ever got torn down. Capital improvements would have to wait for more capital gains. For better and worse, 1939 was the year in which a newly arrived Christopher Isherwood could miraculously confide to his diary, “We had an hour to spare, and we spent it finding an apartment.” So if material comfort wasn’t the enzyme that catalyzed the class of 1939, what was it? We can safely rule out good government, too. A brief entry in the guide’s chronology for Sept. 16 of that year, reading “Special recall election ousts Mayor Frank L. Shaw, electing in his stead Fletcher Bowron,” doesn’t begin to plumb the depths of corrupt executive cluelessness into which the city had descended. “The sun is shining in Southern California and all is well,” Shaw had proclaimed a few months earlier in a national radio address, as more than a hundred of his constituents lay freshly drowned around him. A shaky case might be made that bad government inspires better storytelling than good. Shaw’s kleptocracy and his police department’s strong-arm tactics certainly kept both Raymond Chandler and Los Angeles xxii a writer’ s paradise Times publisher Harry Chandler (no relation, damn it) well provisioned with material—by no means all of which made it into the paper. Perva- sive amorality has never exactly discouraged the production of great cre- ative work, especially dark work, or what’s a Borgia for? Fun though it may be to imagine Shaw and his cronies in the dock pleading, “I did it for art,” this alibi ultimately doesn’t wash. There are just too many counterexamples in history, too many badly governed re- gimes that generated little of lasting value beyond the cautionary. It’s far likelier that Chandler and company variously rose above, hid out below, or plowed implacably along beside the petty distractions of mu- nicipal affairs. One hopes that they voted, though not necessarily that their candidates won. If any single shared force impelled them, it may well have been rivalry—a mutual awareness of what good stuff the competition was turning out. The WPA guide lists no shortage of watering holes for the class of ’39 to gather and goad each other in. Some of these establish- ments survive today, if not all at the same address or with remotely the same menu. Musso & Frank endures, but Lucey’s Cafe on Melrose has long since thrown over “Italian food in an atmosphere of quiet con- servatism” in favor of Mexican cuisine with a picture of Jerry Brown in the window.

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